approximately when did we start counting the year?
In: 15
Depends on who you mean by “we”. If you mean how we call it 2022, that was invented in 525 but wasn’t in popular use until the 9th century. The Mayans, ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, China and many other societies all had their own counting systems too though.
We have probably counted years as long as we have been able to count, and judging from the existence of tally sticks in the archeological record that’s probably several hundred thousand years.
However, most early counting systems were local and short -lived, counting years since some special event like “four years after that really cold winter, or seven years after Tingar took over as chieftain”. These have pretty much all been lost to time.
Even the first long -term settled civilizations like ancient Egypt or Sumer didn’t have one count of years but operated with king lists and “the tenth years of Amun-Ra’d reign”, which makes for a lot of math and painstaking reconstruction by archeologists and historians.
Then we have some early calendars that certainly take a longer view, but without necessarily doing a linear count. Like what we today know as the Chinese and Mayan cyclical calendars . Of course if you know in which cycle something occurred these can also be counted to find which year.
Among the current linear systems, the Hebrew calendar is now at the year 5783, the Islamic year 1444, and the Gregorian calendar 2022. Although all of these have been through some minor adjustments and began counting a few years after their purported year 1.
We do not know. Some of the first ever writing we have found, about 5000 years old, is a calendar listing the royal succession of the Sumerian empire. The list seams pretty accurate for about half a millenium back and several events mentioned can be cross referanced to other sources. The list does continue further back but the dates seams to be wrong. There are however events mentioned in this list as well which can be cross referanced, including the biblical flood.
It would have been nice to say we have consistant calender records all the way to the modern era but sadly this is not the case. For about two thousand years we have been pretty accurate though.
I live in Japan. I was born in the 17th year of the reign of the Showa Emperor. That’s the guy we Americans call Hirohito.
Many pre-historic societies had structures that indicate they understood equinoxes and solstices. Attempts to convert this knowledge to a written calendar that is accurate were largely unsuccessful until humans started navigating long distances by sea and taking precise measurements.
Julius Caesar created the first calendar that we would recognize (the Julian Calendar) but there were disputes about which month it was and many type of leap years and months.
The Gregorian calendar is what we use now, crested in the late 16th century to contain a leap day every four years.
Did someone fighting in the Battle of Hastings know that the year was 1066?
**Edit:** I asked ChatGPT (who is not always right)
It is unlikely that people fighting in the Battle of Hastings knew the specific year in which the battle occurred. The concept of counting and numbering years, as we understand it today, was not widely used in the early medieval period.
In the early medieval period, time was often tracked using the reigns of kings and other rulers, or using important events or milestones. The specific year in which an event occurred might not have been recorded, or it might not have been seen as particularly important.
In addition, the calendars used in the early medieval period did not always align perfectly with the solar year, so the dates of different events might not have been recorded accurately. This would have made it difficult to determine the specific year in which an event occurred, even if the year had been recorded at the time.
Overall, it is unlikely that people fighting in the Battle of Hastings knew the specific year in which the battle occurred. The concept of counting and numbering years, as we understand it today, was not widely used in the early medieval period, and the calendars of the time did not always align perfectly with the solar year.
A useful additional comment on Leftstone2’s excellent answer.
A dating system based on counting from a specific point in the past is, if you think about it, only useful in quite specialised contexts, which is why it takes a while for a system to become widespread.
For a lot of ancient (eg Sumerian or Babylonian) texts, which are often accounting or tax related, “this year”, “next year”, “last year” and that sort of thing are all you need. For people writing chronicles (on the “this happened to us” basis) you might date in relation to current political events, such as “In the 3rd Year of the reign of King Shalmaneser” or whatever. Some of my current ID documentation refers to my date of birth in terms of the Showa Emperor (Hirohito) – for official purposes that sort of dating is still widespread in japan.
But you can’t always do that. Particularly if you are reaching back into the past and trying to reconstruct it. Eg, if you are historian or antiquarian rather than a chronicler. So Roman antiquarians started using the date of the foundation of Rome (A.U.C. = ab urbe condita), but they did not all agree on the exact date which created inconsistencies.
Normal Romans would mostly have used the consular system, eg “the year in which L. Domitius Ahenobarbus and Ap. Claudius Pulcher were consuls”. But you could not do this if you wanted to delve back to the early history of Rome because they did not have consular dating way back then.
Still it is a fairly minority interest.
Enter Dionysius Exiguus (aka “Dennis the Little”) a monk from Spoleto. As far as I can tell he could speak both Greek and Latin. He certainly translated from one to the other. He was concerned with the date of Easter.
(Easter – quick summary: Easter celebrates the death and resurrection of Jesus. This happens at the time of the Jewish Passover, which is tied to the Jewish calendar. Most ancient European/North African and Middle Eastern calendars are luni-solar. You start a new year on a new moon. Annoyingly the Moon, Sun and Earth’s rotation do not line up. So you either (a) sit around and wait until you see a new moon, or you (b) work out a formula to approximate when it would be. Turns out (a) is a bit dodgy, even in Israel let alone N. Europe; also someone might hack your network. So algorithm it is).
In Alexandria (where they still spoke Greek) they had come up with a fairly good formula. In 19 years, the years, months and days nearly exactly line up (about a day out, very close on months). So you can have a sort of 19 year cycle and everything is OK. In Roman/Latin speaking Europe they didn’t really understand it not being able to read Greek (well, more accurately, Greek learning not being so accessible).
Also: mathematical formulae are all very well but you want something that can be used by random monks living on the cold shores of Northumbria, so you make a huge table with one row for each year that says when Easter etc will be.
That is what Dionysius Exiguus. A very big table. Much bigger than any table before.
And here’s the thing: he needed to date things centuries *into the future*. If you are writing about future times you can’t do “Month X of King Y” or anything like that. You need to date from a fixed point. Dennis (as he is sometimes called) disapproved of an existing system dating from the emperor Diocletian (who had persecuted Christians) and thought starting with the year of Jesus’s birth was the right thing to do. Though he miscalculated.
The first line of his table was the year in which Jesus was born. Then the next year (year 1) was the year in which Jesus had his first birthday. Etc.
Yes. This means there *was* a “year zero”, though he did not call it that, which in turn means that AD 2000 was the start of the 21st century :-).
The able was popular amongst calendar geeks, but the system of AD dating was not very well known until a Northumbrian monk called “Bede” picked it up. He wrote a very popular history which used AD for dates from Jesus’s birth onwards. It became a sort of “best seller” and AD spread around.
Some dude ~2000 years ago: “Happy New Year, everyone! It is now the year 3!”
Me: “Wait…. but I’m 28”
We started counting the year about two thousand years ago. People started counting each year so that they could keep track of how long ago things happened.
This discussion reminds me of ‘the longest year in history’: 46BC
It’s when the pre-Julian ‘Roman’ calendar switched over to the Julian one.
Due to some quirks , the adjustment required led to the year being 445 days long .
It was known as the ‘annus confusionis’ (Year of Confusion).
[Link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/46_BC)
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